In
Roger Penrose's
The Emperor's New Mind, he mentions
quantum gravity.
Gravity represents a kind of energy, because it can accelerate a mass (well, actually two masses). The
direction of acceleration of one of the masses is toward the other mass. When the distance between
the two masses shrinks, some
potential energy becomes
kinetic energy, and vice-versa. It seemed to me that he was
suggesting that the amount of energy that gets transferred might be
packaged into
quanta, and an explanation of the situation, presumably much better than this one,
would be the heavily sought theory of quantum gravity.
What has this got to do with Consciousness?
Well, he seemed also to be saying that perhaps consciousness is bound up with this packaging of
gravitaional energy. If he explained how, it was lost on me. Or perhaps it took a while for me to get it.
I have an idea now, but I don't think he suggested it. So here it is...
My idea is that when sensory information becomes available to the brain, the delicacy of neural
behavior allows
many possible paths to be followed simulatneously, and that
a being can choose one of them, imposing its will (animals have brains too) on top of
quantum
mechanics. The choice made reflects one quanta of gravitational energy being translated from kinetic
to potential or vice-versa.
I propose an experiment
I believe there are microprocessors on the market that use quantum mechanics to produce random
numbers. Suppose that we built a device with software that used such a random number to derive an
amount of time to wait before going off. And suppose we designed this system so that it should
average a waiting period of one second. And suppose that another device would detect when it goes
off, wait one second, and then turn it back on. When running, these two systems working together
should cause the device with the random number generator to be on about half the time.
Now, we'd expect such a system to produce off-on events at the same rate all the time. But what are
we to conclude if the rate tends to drift up consistently, so that after leaving such a device alone for,
say an hour or a day or a year, it stays on for an average of 0.8 seconds instead of 1.0 second? I would conclude that the
random number generator has deteriorated, or the device has a desire to be off, or to go off more
often, and such a desire is as conscious as that device can get. What if the rate drifted down
consistently? Maybe the device likes to be on.
My theory of consciousness is that it can control how the
wavefunction
collapses if and when a conscious being chooses, according to its
desire. If we could show that a system such as the one I propose above actually does have a rate that consistently drifts in one direction, we may have some better idea of how we register
pleasure in our brains.